budget

Paying bills and getting us back on track ironically brings a sense of normalcy. I planned out a budget, and DH umpired some double headers two weeks in a row which gives him enough money (up to one thousand dollar loans) to take care of his needs for the next two weeks. This is the first time DH has lived “alone” ever in his life. By alone I mean solely responsible for himself and no one picking up his slack. It’s been an interesting experience for him.

+ for me consisted of getting pay checks and dd’s rent check in the bank and cashing out for envelopes. (Dd pays rent to us on a monthly basis.) Over the weekend I set up the electric/gas bill for payment today. I will go in to online banking this evening or tomorrow morning to set up the rest of the month’s bills. The water bill comes out around the 15th. I may start just paying a flat amount that is just above what we usually pay so I can get it paid a the same time. Sort of like levelized billing, which is not offered on the water bill. We already take advantage of levelized billing for our electric/gas. It is a “rolling average” of the last 12 months.

We got an alarm system for the house with monitoring. We had to adjust the budget for that but we did not have to cut out anything, just lowered another category.